Posted
by
samzenpus
on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @10:12AM
from the risa-in-the-desert dept.

MikeChino writes "King Abdullah of Jordan (who was once an extra in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager) has given the green light to a $1.5 billion Star Trek theme park that will boldly take Jordan where no Gulf state has gone before. While the theme park will not be powered by dilithium crystals, it will utilize green technology in order to lower its carbon footprint — all of its electricity will be generated by renewable sources." Just a few weeks ago Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Ahyan carved his name in the desert so it could be seen from space. It looks like Sci-fi has finally made it to the Middle East. I can't wait for them to discover Firefly.

Religion: A means to control mass amounts of people using fictional stories and imaginary characters to instill fear and devotion into individuals for the purpose of controlling them and taking their hard earned money.

And one is as bad as the next.
I doubt the day will come when all people no longer need religion as a crutch. But with a little education, we can get most of them off the hook.
Another thing, why is it that it is NPC, and often illegal, to criticise religion?

When's the last time you saw anyone else's "statistically insignificant" represenatives rioting over this sort of thing?

The sh*t's going on. You really can't spin your way around that.

You could try the same argument on Xian extremists but you would be lacking any video footage that includes riots and burning people in effigy. There are also no equivalents of Death Warrants there either.

Hmm, let's see... Christian's have the Westboro baptist church, the Irish Republican Army, just to name two. In Judaism there was Irgun [wikipedia.org] which was so out of control that Britain had to wash its hands of Palastine, setting the state for the modern Israeli/Palastinian conflict. All religions have crazy zealots. Islam is not special.

Recently I saw some Christians burning a Quaran in effigy. And another Christian, who like any given Muslim terrorist, clearly represents every other person on the planet who claims to follow a religion of the same name, went on a killing spree in Norway a just a few weeks ago. That's why I'm always watching the Christians in my office nowadays to make sure they don't bring in any assault rifles. When I see them praying near government buildings and youth camps it creeps me the fuck out.

I would like to defuse all "no true Scotsman" accusations by pointing out that the vast majority of those who call themselves Christian would not agree that someone who makes these statements is not Christian.

Either you made a mistake here or you failed to argue against the "no true Scotsman" accusation you rightly saw coming. If I remove the double-negatives in your statement, it's equivalent to "the vast majority of those who call themselves Christian would agree that someone who makes these statements is Christian" or to put it another way, "most Christians would disagree that [someone with Breivik's views] is not Christ

The previous king was often the only voice of reason on matters pertaining to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He was the only one to criticize both sides when they deserved it. The current king was not the crown prince, but the previous king changed his choice of successor at the last minute. Thankfully, king Abdullah has continued his father's tradition.

King Abdullah did things in his youth that he probably would not have done were he the crown prince. Things like appearing as an extra in a Star Trek: TNG episode. I believe that makes him the only monarch on the planet ever to appear in a Star Trek episode. Clearly, he is more of a Star Trek fan than I thought, and good for him.

In case you're too lazy to follow the link, published figures have Slave-I substantially out-performing the Enterprise-D. To address the AC GP, Star Wars vessels routinely travel cross-galaxy in a matter of hours, while Star Trek vessels would take decades to travel across a significant fraction of the galaxy. I'm not the site's author, but I was thoroughly impressed with the analysis and technical knowledge brought to bear on the subject.

While I'd generally agree with some of that (SW ships definitely have the speed advantage), most of the figures cited there are silly. They have the heavy laser gun on a troop transport (a shuttle, basically) putting out enough energy to wipe out all life on the planet in a single shot... Makes the death star kind of redundant, don't it? Their scales are so far off that a single hit from any SW laser or turbolaser should completely incinerates whatever ship it hits if the shields are down, when there's tons

I suspect the reason for this is because when Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda were coming up with these figures, they probably consulted real-life figures and theory and extrapolated, while the author of Star Wars Episode II Incredible Cross-Sections probably just made up stuff that sounded good.

Star Wars Episode II Incredible Cross-Sections was authored in part by Dr. Curthis Saxton, who holds a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Sydney. I can't comment on how he came up with the figures. Even if you ignore the books, which is fair, the Empire comes out on top, at least according to the site. I'm not a mechanical engineer, so I have trouble arguing against his analysis.

I did go to that site and I'm afraid that's like the politicians saying "our policies are right, check this site for the proof" and then linking to their own site. I could link you to my proof, you can link your proof. I've had this discussion too many times, you've had this discussion too many times, do we really need to go into it?

This blows me away, too. Maybe it's as stupid as it sounds. On the other hand, maybe all the action isn't in California and Florida any more? Maybe they know practically no Americans will make the trip and they ran the numbers and found out they don't care?

On the one hand, this is pretty cool, and the general values of Stark Trek (of which free thought and egalitarianism are pretty high on the list) are good things to promote in areas like Jordan. However, the fact that the monarch is already a Trekkie and yet is country is like what it is today doesn't speak highly of how much influence it has really had on him. (Jordan is not nearly as badly off as say Syria, but it is by no means a functioning democracy with human rights. Far from it.) Moreover, the people who go to this will almost certainly be outside tourists, whether Westerners, or rich people from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. So this will probably do very little to directly benefit Jordanians, who have a lot of problems. Again, Jordan's problems aren't nearly as severe as many other countries in the region, the literacy rate is the second highest out of it and its immediate neighbors http://www.indexmundi.com/jordan/literacy.html [indexmundi.com] but there's still a decent chunk of around 10% who can't read. And there's severe unemployment- this project might help with that, but it is tough to tell.

The fact that they are making the park green is noteworthy. Unlike many of the oil states in the region, Jordan's total oil reserve is comparatively small, but they do have a lot of oil shale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_in_Jordan [wikipedia.org] which becomes more valuable as people run out of oil. So it isn't completely clear why Jordan would want to promote green tech other than actual ideology (well and self-interest for when everyone else's oil runs out and they still want their stuff to not be insanely expensive. But that's surprisingly far-sighed in the circumstances). It should be interesting to see where this goes in the next few years.

10% sounds quite a lot, but according to Adult Literacy in America, Third Edition, (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf), "This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information.", which I would define as literacy, but obviously indexmundi uses a different scale, as it states the USA as having a 99% literacy rate.

Most of the "political" literacy rating methods define literacy as being able to read and write your own name. And no, I'm not joking. I wish I was. (In some places, that is called "functional illiterate", which is still worse).

I'd suggest you watch this interview with King Abdullah. While it may be a monarchy, this is a Monarch I can honestly say impressed me. He's well educated, well spoken, and very aware of his own situation. I have no doubt that Jordan is likely to be one of the better middle-eastern states to live in under his leadership.

Abdullah was supposed to show up again to promote his book, but given the situation in the Middle East, he sent the Ambassador instead. Interestingly enough, he's a Pretender to the Throne of Iraq--if they ever brought back the monarchy, I think they could do quite a bit worse than him:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Zeid_bin_Ra'ad [wikipedia.org]

Let me preface what I'm about to say by saying that from everything I've read and seen, and with the comparative openness of Jordan and Jordanian society, I think King Abdullah (and King Hussein before him) is a good man and leader, and in no way compares to some of the people that follow. I think many foreign dignitaries come off quite well on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report (like Pakistani ex-president Pervez Musharraf, and former Egyptian first lady Suzanne Mubarak)--it's their opportunity to present themselves to a good portion of the American public (and given the international distribution, probably a not-insignificant amount of viewers throughout the western world). I have a feeling that were Asma (Emma) and/or Bashar al-Assad ever to go on, they'd probably be similarly charming and well-spoken. During World War II, Joseph Stalin cultivated the image of Uncle Joe in Allied countries.

All that said, Jordan hasn't launched invasions of its neighbours, there don't seem to be mass-graves or concentration camps in Jordan, there haven't been brutal and bloody crackdowns (as in Libya or Syria), and Jordan is open enough to the rest of the world that we'd probably be able to tell.

Perhaps for now. But eventually he will die and thus the monarch will be run by someone else. There's no way to know if the next in line will be a complete asshole or not. Power changes people. That is why monarchs are so unstable and shouldn't be trusted as a viable form of governance.

The fact that they are making the park green is noteworthy. Unlike many of the oil states in the region, Jordan's total oil reserve is comparatively small, but they do have a lot of oil shale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_in_Jordan [wikipedia.org] which becomes more valuable as people run out of oil. So it isn't completely clear why Jordan would want to promote green tech other than actual ideology (well and self-interest for when everyone else's oil runs out and they still want their stuff to not be insanely expensive. But that's surprisingly far-sighed in the circumstances). It should be interesting to see where this goes in the next few years.

Maybe they have come to the conclusion (as many other groups have) that oil shale is so painfully difficult to get usable crude out of that conservation actually makes *sense* despite the promises of fifty trillion barrels "sitting right under our feet"? If we haven't already completely boned the environment with burning off all the light sweet crude we can find in easy to access deposits, the energy consumed and requisite pollution generated in just *gathering* the crude from the oil shale will certainly

So it isn't completely clear why Jordan would want to promote green tech other than actual ideology (well and self-interest for when everyone else's oil runs out and they still want their stuff to not be insanely expensive. But that's surprisingly far-sighed in the circumstances).

It's not particularly far sighted at all, in fact Jordan is more a follower than a leader - the oil states have been starting to diversify for some time now. Consider this story [slashdot.org] from 2010, or this one [slashdot.org] from just a couple of weeks a

That would require having the original that didn't suck. With all the fans who see so much in star trek... All in all they are just a show that keeps us entertained an hour a week. Then like a lot of entertainment which we valued too much in our youth spin offs just don't seem right as you can watch the new shows without your past emotional baggage.

That is fairly brilliant, actually. Hotel Utopia Planitia [memory-alpha.org]. The whole hotel could host one or more murder-mystery-scale adventures at once, sort of like a gigantic magic motion ride. Only some elevators need to be special though, and the bridge.

I don't know, if you consider the Spice to be a metaphor for Oil, then the book is about how some dirty nomads overthrow the oppressive resource monopolizing government. Maybe not the message the gulf state monarchs want to convey.

I remember that at some point, I believe under Leto II's rule Arrakis basically has Fremen-themed reservations/safari/theme-park where descendents of the Fremen reenact their ancestors' nomadic lifestyle.So might be a bit too meta.

That kind of money could buy how many new seasons of Firefly? Wow, what a thought! And more seriously, I don't think it would be a bad idea for rich sheiks who don't know what to do with their money to invest in something cultural and immortal like a smart scifi show. It would generate a whole lot of good will and visibility than some vanity theme park or a sign visible from space.

Most of the Jordanian population lives in the west, close to the Jordan river - not in the east. It is about a thousand miles from Amman (the capital) or Aqaba (the one port and the location of the park) to the Persian Gulf.

I think this is stimulus spending. Abdullah doesn't want to have the problems of his neighbors to the north (Syria) and south-west (Egypt).

With luck and really good security, they might be able to get a lot of tourists from Israel.

How is that hard? Just blow the bomb up in the middle of the long lines of people waiting to go through security. I mean... if you've ever been to a theme park you know how the lines to get tickets (nevermind to get through tight security) can be massive...

Besides, I wasn't commenting so much on the difficulty of bombing, because yes, with enough money, security could be made virtually air-tight.

I was merely saying that it seems like it would only take one incident to bankrupt the park. The thought that you might be killed, or that others were murdered right where you are standing, really takes all the joy out of a theme-park.

I think a lot of the appeal of park would be lost to Trekkies if the park just catered to Arabic speaking tourists. At the same time though, it's in an Arabic speaking country so it seems kind of odd for it be in English.

I guess it'll have to be bi-lingual in absence of universal translators. This situation just seems kind of odd to me in that American franchise would have a theme park catering to it in another part of the world.

Who seriously believes that nerds are going to fly in sufficient numbers to the middle east and spend enough money to justify spending a billion and a half dollars on a theme park? It's one of those ideas which is so fucking stupid it would take a king to greenlight it.

Poeple in the middle east need theme parks as well. It doesn't really mater what the theme is. If it still has roller coasters, water slides, and a reasonalbe ticket price it will do well. Not much added cost in making it trekkie themed. Cheap uniforms, plastic props, and paint will get you 90% there.

Why wouldn't people go? People travel to Dubai all the time. And Jordan is much closer to Europe than the United States is, so Europeans would have an easier time going there than here, especially if the park were in, say, California. And you're also ignoring all the other things that can be staged in and around the park. They could put on the biggest Star Trek convention you've ever seen. And even if the thing only manages to break even, the boost to the local economy could be huge.

Who seriously believes that nerds are going to fly in sufficient numbers to the middle east and spend enough money to justify spending a billion and a half dollars on a theme park?

There are nerds -- and, more relevant to the immediate issue, Star Trek fans, which while the two groups overlap aren't the same thing -- in the Middle East. (Including, incidentally, King Abdullah of Jordan.)

Plus, from most of the descriptions I can find in news articles, it seems to be only a mildly Star Trek themed park, and m

The Las Vegas Hilton Star Trek mockups, museum and rides were interesting, even with a $16 admission. But interested dwindled in tandem with no TV series and only one movie int he past eight years. And the closed it a few years ago.

Lesson learned - always find time to cast the Crown Prince to be on your show, you never know when it'll pay off:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmut6FJ1d4M [youtube.com]
Now we know what ??? is in step 3: wait for extra to become wealthy king.

Beam, Shuttle Craft or some primitive transport (Like Jet plane or Camel). I still want to get there.
BTW: How many TV Series can boast having 2 of the best known "Kings" as Fans (The other being Martin Luther King)

Roddenberry? he was a tv guy who managed to get one mediocre program on the air. One whose best episodes he had nothing to do with. Don't get me wrong I enjoy ST, but to put him in the same league as Edison*? Tesla? the wright brothers? please.